Every jazz city has a graveyard of rooms.
New York has the Five Spot, the original Blue Note on 57th Street, the Half Note, Slugs’ in the East Village. Chicago has the Blue Note on Clark Street, the Sutherland Hotel lounge, countless South Side rooms whose names survive only in oral history. New Orleans has lost clubs to hurricanes and economics and the gradual displacement of the neighborhoods that sustained them.
The Twin Cities list is long too. Rossi’s. Jazzmines. The Times. The River Road Club. The Gay Paree. The Colonial. The Hollywood. The clubs that made up the scene I came up through in the 1970s and 1980s, most of which are gone. The list says something about what it takes to sustain a jazz venue — and about what the Twin Cities scene has managed to keep alive despite the losses.
I want to be honest about what I know and what I am reconstructing from oral history. Some of these rooms I was in. Some I know only through the musicians who were there before me, through Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip, through the papers Leigh Kamman left at the Hennepin County Library. Jazz history is always partly archaeology — you find what survives and reason back toward what happened.
The Mendota Cluster
The earliest rooms in this story cluster around Mendota, the small town across the Minnesota River from Fort Snelling that was, improbably, one of the centers of Twin Cities traditional jazz for decades.
Doc Evans’ Rampart Street Club ran from 1958 to 1961. Doc Evans — cornetist, Dixieland revivalist, one of the key figures in Traditional jazz in the Upper Midwest — built a room in Mendota because Mendota would let him. The room closed after three years, but it established the idea that the area could support live jazz and created the audience that the Emporium of Jazz inherited when it opened in 1966.
The Gay Paree, the Colonial, and the Hollywood were part of the same Mendota cluster — roadhouse-style venues that operated along the river road and served the Minneapolis and St. Paul crowd that was willing to make the drive for music and atmosphere. Red Dougherty’s quintet played Mitch’s roadhouse in this area. These were not jazz clubs in the formal sense — they were clubs that had jazz in them, which is a different thing and a more precarious thing. When the jazz stopped being the draw, the rooms moved on to other entertainment.
The Emporium of Jazz survived longer than any of them — twenty-five years — because Stan and Russ Hall and Dave Odell decided to run it as a dedicated jazz room rather than a general entertainment venue. That decision cost money and ultimately it was what saved the room, in the sense that the Emporium became what it became rather than becoming something else.
The Minneapolis Scene
The Minneapolis clubs were more varied and more transient than the Mendota cluster. Rossi’s, Jazzmines, the Times — these were the names that appeared on the Jazz Notes calendar in the 1980s, the rooms where you could hear live jazz on a Tuesday or Thursday without driving to Mendota or paying the Dakota’s prices.
I edited Jazz Notes. I know what the calendar looked like. There were weeks when there were fifteen venues listed. There were weeks when a freeze had emptied the city and the venues were running half-empty but running. The rooms existed in a fragile ecosystem that depended on musicians who were willing to play for modest pay, audiences who were willing to leave their houses on weeknights in January, and owners who were willing to absorb the losses that came with a category of entertainment that was never going to be a profit center.
The River Road Club was a different kind of venue — the kind with what the musicians called an “unruly clientele,” a phrase that covered a range of situations and meant that playing there required a certain adaptability. Cornbread Harris played there. Augie Garcia played there. These were musicians who understood that jazz in the working-class context was different from jazz at the Dakota, and who had the skill to meet audiences where they were.
What Stays and What Goes
The Artist’s Quarter lasted thirty-seven years. The Dakota has lasted forty. KBEM Jazz 88 has been on the air for fifty-plus years. These are the institutions that survived — and each of them survived because someone made a decision to absorb losses rather than close.
The rooms that closed did not necessarily fail at being jazz clubs. Many of them were excellent jazz clubs for the years they operated. They closed because the economics eventually stopped working, because leases ended and landlords had other ideas, because the owners aged out or burned out or decided they had done enough. The churn does not mean the scene is dying. It means the scene is alive enough to keep trying.
What’s Still Running
The newer rooms have taken different approaches to the sustainability problem.
Jazz Central Studios at 407 Central Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis solved the economic problem by becoming a nonprofit — removing the profit motive that makes commercial venues vulnerable to the inevitable bad months. The fifty-seat room runs on donations and community support, which is a precarious model but a different kind of precarious than depending on ticket sales.
Crooners Supper Club in Fridley takes the supper-club approach — tying jazz to food and cocktails in a way that spreads the economic load across multiple revenue streams. The outdoor stage in summer draws audiences who might not come specifically for jazz but stay for it.
Berlin in the North Loop books forward-thinking jazz, often with no cover charge — a model that accepts lower revenue per night in exchange for removing the barrier to entry that cover charges represent for new audiences.
Studio Z at 275 East 4th Street in St. Paul hosts the “Jazz at Studio Z” series, curated by guitarist Zacc Harris, in a space that prioritizes experimental and improvised music. It operates on a curatorial model rather than a commercial one.
None of these rooms are the Artist’s Quarter or the Emporium of Jazz. They are their own things, built for their own moment. The Twin Cities scene has always worked this way — each generation inherits the audience and the musicians from the previous rooms and builds something new with them.
The list of closed rooms is long. The scene is still here. Both of those things are true, and together they tell you something real about what this city has chosen to sustain.
Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip documents the Twin Cities traditional jazz scene with the depth it deserves. Leigh Kamman’s papers, including scripts and correspondence from The Jazz Image, are archived at the Hennepin County Library.
